Microsoft just got even more interesting 18 Apr, 2016

Over the past few years, I’ve had cause to tinker with Visual Studio and its stable-mates more and more. Quite a few corporates have laid their eggs in the Microsoft basket, and the tooling is better than ever. .NET, Entity Framework, Web API, MVC .NET… some Good Things have been happening, all spurred on by intitiatives like “coding-by-convention”, the rise of node.js with its simple approach to the server runtime.

I was mildly interested when Microsoft announced Visual Studio Code, and the ability to build stuff on OS X, but the really good stuff is happening now:

Microsoft Graph

This is billed as One endpoint to rule them all, and is all about providing a single API endpoint for access to everything in the Microsoft cloud: data, business intelligence, organisational relationships, files, email, and so forth. Very cool (read more Microsoft Graph website).

Cortana & machine learning

The Cortana Analytics Suite looks interesting: Microsoft’s answer to Siri has now morphed into Microsoft’s answer to Watson, with support for myriad languages inclyding R and Python. Read more: Microsoft machine learning.

Ubuntu userspace on Windows

This is rather cool. A joint project between Microsoft and Canonical unveiled its secrets at the Build developer conference a couple of weeks back. Imagine running a bash shell natively on Windows 10: that’s what is coming. A kind of “Wine in reverse”, whereby Ubuntu binaries are running directly in Windows thanks to a syscall translation layer called “Windows Subsystem for Linux.” If you’re a Windows 10 Insider, you can start with this now: Dustin Kirkland, HOWTO: Ubuntu on Windows.

All good stuff. However, if the last two weeks have taught me anything, getting into the Microsoft cloud (i.e. Azure) and developing stuff is a massive pain in the arse thanks to their byzantine web sites, myriad sign-up screens with lack of SSO and the ridiculously complex MSDN / Azure set-up that Microsoft have (it’s up there with IBM Partnerworld). Still a lot of work to do.